by Cat Rambo
Miss Sallie was his granddaughter. Did I mention that?
Oh, I wish you had known Miss Sallie. Mr. Percy, you can pretty much sum him up: He dug, and he died, and there’s the tunnel, The End. But Miss Sallie, she was the complicated one. Five foot tall if she’s a day, and always such a solemn little thing. She’d tell a joke, and it would strike you funny maybe three weeks later.
“You ought to smile more,” her other grandfather, Mr. Wilson, would say. “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”
“That may be true,” Miss Sallie said, “if you like flies.”
“She’s got you there, Will,” Mr. Percy said. “Sallie, bring that tripod closer, will you?”
Mr. Wilson never knew what to make of Sallie, but when all his cells broke down, she grieved like everyone else. Everyone at Cherokee-Monsanto turned out for the memorial service, and the company paid for everything—purely out of respect, they said, and never mind the Exempt employees’ contractual indemnification waiver. One day years later, on the anniversary of his death, Miss Sallie and Mr. Percy got to talking about him, and they put some of Mr. Wilson’s favorite things, like his faux-ivory vape, and his faux-leather collar, and a photograph of him standing on his hands in biker shorts inside the pedestrian tunnel beneath the Thames, in that old Black Panther lunchbox, and Mr. Percy attached the lunchbox to his 1,200-watt halogen-light tripod and moved it along inside the tunnel as he worked, so that it was with him always.
“That box, it’s sort of watching over me,” Mr. Percy said.
“It’s like a mezuzah,” said Sallie, who at fifteen was assembling her own post-atheist belief system, like from a kit.
“I don’t know about that,” Mr. Percy said, after Sallie had explained what a mezuzah was. “God’s name ain’t in that box. It’s just something to remember your Grandpa Wilson by, that’s all.”
When Sallie told her study-group cohort in Abu Dhabi and Kinshasa and Annapolis, via link, about the mobile shrine to Grandpa Wilson, they asked her, not for the first time, whether she thought Grandpa Percy was perhaps two buckets shy of a full wheelbarrow.
“I think he’s interesting,” Sallie said. This was not quite a rebuttal, but it was the highest praise she knew.
Of course, Sallie was there the day he broke through. Grandpa Percy made sure of that, by alerting her school app ahead of time, to make sure she logged out early. Being a senior, she only had to upload for three hours a day anyhow.
She hastened down the tunnel with mixed emotions, elated to realize that her face was being licked by the thinnest of breezes from up ahead. The sensation was so faint that it might have been Grandpa Wilson’s righteous ibbur paying a visit—she was in a Lurianic Kabbalah phase at the time—but it strengthened the farther she went, and she imagined that she also was growing taller, as tall perhaps as Grandpa Percy. When she reached the end of the tunnel, the pencil-thin sunbeam streaming over the old man’s shoulder was like a benediction.
“Don’t just stand there,” said Grandpa Percy, smiling as wide as a stuffed raccoon. He handed her his gold-painted shovel and said, “The sky is waiting, Sallie. Help me dig it out.”
Well, how do you think I know all this, child? She told me about it, later, just as I am telling you, and I listened.
Unusually for a mountain girl, Sallie did not like heights one bit, and had fretted that the tunnel might open onto a two-hundred-foot drop, straight down. Instead, she and her grandfather, working together, hacked their way onto a roughly 16-percent glaciated slope that, while bare by Appalachian standards, was nevertheless studded with handholds: bushes and rocks, quartzite by her reckoning. So she felt better about standing next to the old man, at the edge of the world.
The view was amazing—the Blue Ridge all around, the Eagles™ arcing across the sky above, the maglev gleaming in the valley below—and, even better, she knew it was a view that would not have existed without her grandfather. He had created that vista, by digging through a mountain with his name on it.
“What a lovely sight,” she said, looking far out and away, at the same moment he said, “What a lovely spot,” looking down and around their feet, at the mountainside. “No rhododendrons, though,” he added. Back at the house, his husband’s ashes had fed the rhododendrons that Grandpa Wilson loved so much.
“Seems like we should do something,” she said, “or say something . . . ceremonial.”
“What sort of something?” asked Grandpa Percy.
After some thought, Sallie stepped back into the new-dug mouth of the tunnel. Her grandfather heard a clanking sound. She stepped out again with the open lunchbox, peering at its contents.
“I was thinking about bya gtor,” she said, “which means ‘alms for the birds.’ The Tibetan sky burial. Like the Vajrāyana Buddhists? We could leave Grandpa Wilson’s things here on the hillside, in the open air.”
Grandpa Percy stroked his chin and finally said, “What use would the birds have for this stuff?”
“Good point,” Sallie said. “At least they can eat the Tibetans.”
Now it was Grandpa Percy’s turn to re-enter the mountain and emerge with gifts. He handed Sallie the second shovel, keeping the gold-painted one for himself. “We got one more hole to dig,” he said.
They dug a small, square pit right in front of the tunnel mouth, on what you might call the threshold. It was just big enough to hold the lunchbox.
“You sure you don’t want it?” Grandpa Percy asked.
“I’m sure,” Sallie said. “I’m an adult now, I guess.”
So they interred her Black Panther lunchbox, with Mr. Wilson’s pretties in it, and then Sallie wept for both her grandfathers, and for her younger self. Not letting go of her shovel, she hugged the old man one-armed, and inhaled his distinctive scent: rock dust and camphor, with a sweet-sour hint of pine.
After ten minutes, or thirty, or maybe an hour—some timeless duration—Grandpa Percy squeezed her shoulder and said, “Let’s go home.”
Now, please write down that the old man did not, as some people claim, die that very night. He didn’t even die that month. People will exaggerate, given half a chance.
He didn’t last long, though.
Toward the end, as she sat at his bedside, Sallie asked him whether he ever missed his old job.
“Digging out the sky?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I mean coal.”
He smiled. When he shook his head, his skin rustled, like paper. “No, honey. I miss your Grandpa Wilson. I miss my parents. And sometimes, only sometimes, I miss original-recipe KFC. The original original recipe, I mean. But no, I do not miss coal. Coal was a greasy black rock that raped the land and choked the lungs with poison and flooded Norfolk. No one will miss coal.”
They thought about this together, in silence.
He finally allowed, “But I reckon there are some good songs about coal.”
“Yeah,” she said, “but all the good coal songs are about death.”
Grandpa Percy smiled again. “Well, duh,” he said.
He died that night, still smiling.
And that’s the story of the Percy Seaton Tunnel, which I guess is just about our town’s biggest tourist attraction. Outside the entrance is the state’s 3,567,198th Virtual Historical Marker, which appears when you aim at the wall. I wrote the text myself. Like all historical markers, it leaves out everything interesting.
Miss Sallie? Why, she’s in university now, up in Morgantown. Working on her second, or maybe third Ph.D., and teaching all the classes she already took. Handing back one bucket after another.
What field? Now, that is a good question. Last I heard, it was geophysics? Geothermal medicine? Geogenetics? Geo-something.
I do know this. She took her grandfather’s shovel with her.
About the Author
Andy Duncan’s stories have appeared
in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Tor.com and many anthologies, including multiple year’s-best volumes. His honors include a Nebula Award, a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and three World Fantasy Awards, the most recent for “Wakulla Springs,” co-written with Ellen Klages. His third collection, An Agent of Utopia: New and Selected Stories, was published by Small Beer Press in 2018. A native of Batesburg, South Carolina, and a graduate of Clarion West 1994, he has an M.F.A. from the University of Alabama and teaches writing at Frostburg State University in Maryland.
Editor’s Note
Anyone who has ever heard Andy Duncan read in public will forever-after hear his stories in his distinctive drawl; and if you haven’t, I urge you to look on YouTube or go to a reading by him so you can experience that delight in person.
Andy’s story is folksy and charming, but like so many of the other stories in the book, shows underneath a world shaped by the policies of 45’s administration: Appalachia has turned to data-mining rather than coal, librarian is an elected (but not, apparently, a highly contested) position, and the rising waters are all part of the background.
Mr. Percy is a heroic figure of a peculiarly American sort, devoted to what seems like a nonsensical dream. Dig through a mountain? Impossible. And yet he does, a testimony to the power of chipping away at things, bit by bit, a steady, gradual effort, until he finally breaks through to find the sky is waiting.
A Gardener’s Guide to the Apocalypse
Lynette Mejía
January
By the middle of this month, the earliest narcissus are in active growth, sword-like bright green foliage slicing through the accumulated layer of fallen autumn leaves. In my Southern zone 8 garden there is no snow on the ground, although the weather has been cold and wet. We used to get a couple of light snows each winter, a day or so when the roads would close and the world would slow for a bit. Looking back now I see that those days were a gift rather than the inconvenience they seemed at the time.
The ash comes and goes now, a vast improvement over the early days, when great gray clouds lingered in the air for weeks, choking every living thing, trapping us indoors for weeks.
In time it began to settle, silently sifting down with deceptive gentleness, transforming the land into a vast and formless nothing. Day after day I spent outdoors with a wet cloth tied round my face, washing and wiping the leaves in the vegetable garden. Eventually Donnie rigged up a tent system with frost cloths and old metal fence posts that we could simply shake off every morning. Thin and translucent, the cloths let in just enough of the remaining sunlight to keep most things alive.
The crocus will be up any day now, followed by the small, jewel-like blue iris reticulata, the deep purple muscari, and the rest of those daffodils, their bright blooms spanning late winter to early spring. The old cow field beyond the barn has gone from gray-brown to bright green with the appearance of wild onion and the stalks of thousands upon thousands of buttercups ready to burst forth into a tender sea of yellow-gold. They push up through the black slushy mud like bits of light, which of course they are, in a way.
They’re all contaminated of course, but the fact that they’ve returned imparts a sense of normality, and their familiar, weedy faces are a comfort. Like everything else they’re early this year, but they’re still here, like us, and that’s the important thing.
February
The frost date’s been pushed back, obviously, so now is the time to start seeds for the spring vegetable and flower gardens. Corn, cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, and sweet peas can all be sown in flats to be planted in the ground as soon as the soil temperature stays consistently above 60° at night.
It’s important to mind planting depth; a good rule of thumb to remember is the smaller the seed, the shallower it should be planted. Lettuce and carrots, for example, should be sown on top of the soil, and only covered lightly with compost or topsoil before watering in. Squash, on the other hand, should be planted approximately 1½-2” deep. Water seeds well and cover with plastic to hold in the moisture. When the seeds have sprouted, remove the covers and place them in a bright but protected location, watering only when the soil is dry.
Donnie says there’s probably no use planting any kind of seed this year. Deep down I know he’s right. Nevertheless, I continue on, adapting as I must and making do with what I have. As a gardener, I’m curious at how our present situation has affected the seeds we stored last summer. We’d already collected everything by the time the bombs came down, but the poisoned wind that followed in their wake blew through everything at the atomic level, and I wonder now, as any good layman scientist would, whether they’ll germinate.
Donnie is indulgent, even joking occasionally about three-eyed eggplants and corn stalks sprouting legs, but I know he thinks I’m slightly ridiculous. On the bad days he says I’m ridiculous. On the worst days I agree with him.
Still, here I am, out in the greenhouse, spreading compost into flats and sowing row upon row of tiny seeds. They are little packets of hope, I suppose.
March
In March spring officially arrives, and we can plant warm season vegetables and bedding plants. By month’s end, most anything planted from seed in January and February should be large enough to move out into the garden, though of course the vigilant gardener will keep cloth covers or glass cloches on hand in case the errant frost manages to work itself down this far south. Let’s face it—the weather’s been understandably unpredictable this year, so relying on one’s own judgment is the best advice I can give. Corn, squash, and cucumbers can all be sown directly into the ground this month as well, and peppers and melons can be started in the greenhouse once your early birds have gone on to live outdoors.
Lately the rain has prevented much work in the garden. It has poured for nearly three straight weeks now. Not the clear, cool rains of our youth, but a gray, ash-choked liquid that burns if it stays on your skin too long, and turns tender young vegetable leaves a sickly yellow.
Donnie and I strained it through layers of cheesecloth while we had it and old shirts after that, but the taste is still awful, hinting at traces of lye and who knows what else. Besides, no amount of cheesecloth could take out the worst things lurking in there. Still, we collect what we can in barrels and buckets, storing it in every available container for later, when the hot weather comes. As Donnie says in that matter-of-fact way of his, better to have and not need than to need and not have.
In the beginning, we had some bottled water on hand, but it ran out within the first week. Later on we found some old lemonade drink mix packets left behind when the grocery stores were looted, but even that’s gone now. Donnie says he will try to get the old well pump working again, but after an inspection that seems doubtful at best. It was only ever used to provide water to the previous owner’s livestock, and it’s been out of use so long now that its primary component seems to be rust. Still, working on those practicalities saves his sanity as much as gardening saves mine, so I leave him to his tools and his work.
April
April in the South is probably the most beautiful month, the garden’s last grand ball before the blazing heat of summer sets in. Temperatures are generally in the 70’s to low 80’s, and all of the cool season bedding plants are at peak flower. Around the beginning of the month the ubiquitous azaleas come into bloom, coating the land with splashes of pink, purple, red and white. North American native dogwood, Cornus florida, blooms around the same time, dotting the hills and forest edges with bursts of smooth white blossoms.
T.S. Eliot declared April to be the cruelest month, but here among the ashes, it seems rather kind. Last week the rain finally stopped, and we’ve even seen the sun a couple of times. It’s hotter than it should be, but that was an issue even before the world ended. So far we’ve only lost a couple of tomato plants and a few peppers that couldn’t take wet feet. Yes
terday I harvested our third batch of lettuce.
This book was originally Donnie’s idea. A way to keep me from going completely mad in those early days after the war, days when there was nothing but the horror of the news reports, and then nothing at all once the power went out. That first time we stayed in the dark and the cold for three weeks, the Thanksgiving dinner I’d bought but not cooked rotting in the refrigerator, our small Christmas tree standing half decorated in the shadows. Eventually the power came on again for nearly a whole day, and that gave us more hope than anything, because it meant that someone fairly close by had survived and was trying to keep things running. After that it was sporadic, a day here, a few hours there, enough to charge batteries and check in on the death of the world.
In the beginning we immediately logged onto the Internet to try and find out as much news as we could, but eventually we had to stop that. It was just too much, like turning on a fire hose of misery that blasted you full in the face. I would stare at the screen, absorbing the madness and the chaos through the very pores of my skin, and when the power went out again I’d collapse into despair, ruined by the tragic loss of it all.
Donnie said that instead I should focus on what we could do here and now, which was repair the house and try to grow food. He reminded me that the garden had always been my refuge, even before the war, and how after the miscarriage three years ago I’d built the vegetable garden, nearly singlehandedly, in just a month. He said the world is a new place now, but that people would always need food, and always need flowers to cheer them, and maybe I could use my knowledge to help whoever may come after us. I think that many more people will need to learn how to grow their own food now, he said. You could help them with that.
